This Is Us Reveals How Jack Died in 'Super Bowl Sunday'

This recap contains spoilers for This Is Us Season 2, episode 14, titled "Super Bowl Sunday."

If you stuck around after the Super Bowl for NBC's much-hyped installment of This Is Us -- either out of morbid curiosity or because you're a legit fan -- you were treated to the surreal spectacle of watching a beloved character die for our "entertainment," using the platform of one of TV's biggest events to amplify the drama.

The episode, aptly titled "Super Bowl Sunday," was a cry-fest, to be sure, because this show is used to wringing our tear ducts dry with surgical precision, but there's no denying that the whole exercise also felt unashamedly manipulative, which is a trap This Is Us often falls into -- especially when it's trying to hide things from the audience to show us how clever it is. For viewers who tuned in for the first time after the big game (if you didn't immediately rush to watch The Cloverfield Paradox), it probably made the regular This Is Us audience seem like complete masochists.

Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) has been a dead man walking since Season 1, but the decision to build an ongoing narrative and marketing mystery out of the circumstances surrounding his death -- basically treating a family's most devastating loss like the the hatch from Lost -- has not only felt kind of tasteless, but now leaves the show without the storytelling engine that has been powering it since Season 1. Sure, there will no doubt be other questions raised over the course of the series (like how the hell Rebecca ended up falling for bland Miguel), but none so seismic or emotionally resonant as the death of the Pearson patriarch.

So now we're left to wonder, what kind of show does This Is Us want to be from here on out? Will it morph into another relatable family drama like Parenthood, or will it continue trying to keep the audience guessing with new twists, treating every season like one of J.J. Abrams' mystery boxes, albeit with more realistic stakes?

Exit Theatre Mode

"Super Bowl Sunday" couldn't resist throwing a few last minute curveballs our way -- and perhaps that's less about the writers trying to mislead us and more indicative of how savvy showrunners assume viewers are now, continually searching for clues and trying to "solve" our favorite shows rather than passively consuming them like we could with the procedurals of yore. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt, even though this show often feels like it's gleefully playing our heartstrings like a fiddle just because it thinks we all need the catharsis.

12 TV Shows That Premiered After the Super Bowl

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The Cloverfield Paradox was far from the first time the Super Bowl was used to release a new project. Here are 12 TV shows that premiered right after the big game over the years, for better or worse.

01 OF 13

The Cloverfield Paradox was far from the first time the Super Bowl was used to release a new project. Here are 12 TV shows that premiered right after the big game over the years, for better or worse.

12 TV Shows That Premiered After the Super Bowl

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The first twist came before the opening titles, after Jack woke up to find his house on fire, courtesy of a faulty Crock-Pot (which, after being revealed as the cause of the fire last week, immediately sent the company into hilarious damage control mode). After a harrowing close call while rescuing Kate from her bedroom across the hall, and then an equally harrowing ordeal of getting her, Randall and Rebecca safely outside, our heroic papa bear rushed back into the house to save Kate's dog. The camera lingered ominously on the upstairs windows as the flames leapt higher, panning over to Rebecca and the kids' stricken faces for just long enough to make us certain that Jack was toast (sorry) before he burst from the front door, carrying the dog, the family photo albums and Rebecca's beloved moon necklace safely with him, because he's. Just. That. Good.

But of course, it didn't take long for the other shoe to drop. Jack seemed fine when he and Rebecca went to the hospital to get his burns bandaged up, but as soon as Rebecca's back was turned, buying chocolate from the vending machine and calling the kids at Miguel's to check up on them, Jack unexpectedly went into cardiac arrest brought on by smoke inhalation.

Just like Rebecca, the audience missed Jack's final moments, only seeing the chaos behind Rebecca's oblivious back as the doctors and nurses rushed into the room to try and save him. Regardless of any criticisms there may be about the episode as a whole, Mandy Moore's performance was utterly devastating as she learned about Jack's death, cycling through denial and anger to complete despair in the space of a few moments. It was agonizing to watch, and they should probably start engraving the Emmy with her name right now. (Also an unexpected treat: Legion's Bill Irwin guest-starring as the unfortunate doctor who had to break the news to her.)

The episode's later twist (which felt far more emotionally affecting -- probably because it wasn't so telegraphed) introduced another part of the Pearson family timeline, flashing forward to show an older Randall visiting his daughter, Tess, at work. Apparently, she grows up to be a social worker, helping kids to find foster homes like the one her family provided.

Throughout the episode, we saw an unidentified social worker (aka grown-up Tess) working with a young boy who was about to be placed with a new family, leading us to believe that this mystery child would be Randall and Beth's new foster kid, but a poignant conversation young Tess had with Randall towards the end of the episode revealed why she would someday feel compelled to choose this particular career path, while simultaneously strengthening the bond between father and daughter. This particular reveal didn't feel forced the way much of Jack's storyline has, and it was by far the strongest aspect of the episode, aside from the power of the cast's performances as Rebecca and the kids reckoned with their grief in deeply personal ways.

So This Is Us now has an opportunity to reinvent itself; something that another NBC hit, The Good Place, has managed to do on an almost weekly basis -- a high-wire act that somehow never feels forced from the genius comedy, probably because its subversive spirit seems to spring from character development, rather than the needs of the plot, which is a lesson This Is Us could stand to learn.

It seems impossible to imagine that broadcast's biggest hit in years will give up on its fondness for twists in favor of more pedestrian plotting, and there's no reason why it should, when cliffhanger endings have now become a hallmark of the binge-watching culture kickstarted by Netflix, since networks seem paranoid that viewers won't remember to come back next week unless they're left with an intriguing hook.

There's nothing wrong with leaving the audience wanting more, per se, but the effect is cheapened when a show is treating deep-seated emotional trauma as a puzzle that needs to be solved. If This Is Us wants to move beyond Jack's death, as it seemed to imply its characters might start to do in Kevin's therapy episode, it's going to have to find sources of conflict that don't revolve around a traumatic incident from 20 years ago. Likewise, if Jack is still going to be involved in the series (since there's a lot from his past we still haven't seen, and Ventimiglia is still a series regular), it will need to prove that it's more interested in exploring how he lived, instead of how he died.